Chapter 23

Around the time that Harry could take five steps unassisted, we ran out of paper. The next day, he drew a circle on the back of my hand.

“And here I thought you valued your life,” I said darkly.

“Come now, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward. You know that I don’t.” He said the words lightly, mockingly, but there was a ring of truth about them. There were times when he was Harry to me and times when I could hear Toby in his tone, no matter how much I tried to ignore it. His memories hadn’t come back—I was certain of that—but I was also growing surer by the day that he could sense a darkness behind the veil of the blank spaces in his memory.

I couldn’t help wondering what that darkness was, what secrets had been locked away by his amnesia. I thought sometimes about the way he’d begged me to let him die. I’d done a valiant job at thwarting him. He was alive. He was getting stronger.

And he was an incredible pain in my ass. “If you’re going to torture me, not-nurse Hannah—or worse, try to motivate me—the least you could do is let me finish that.” He nodded to my hand.

I looked at the circle. It was perfectly drawn—impossibly so. “Do I even want to know what you’re drawing?” I asked.

Harry smiled, one of those smug, one of us is winning this and it isn’t you smiles of his. “I don’t know, lügnerin. Do you?”

I wasn’t positive what language he’d just used, but I knew damn well what he’d said, and he was right: I was a liar. Every day, I came here and pretended that he hadn’t killed my sister. Some days, I could almost believe it.

“One hour,” I told him, my tone making clear that my terms weren’t up for negotiation. “One full hour of grueling rehab. That’s what you’re going to give me if I let you finish your little drawing.”

“You’re going to work me hard.” The edge of that smile pulled up slightly on one side.

“I hate you and want you out of my life,” I replied. “Do we have a deal?”

He reached for my hand. “You know we do.”

At the very top of the circle—from my perspective—he drew a W. The touch of the pen was light against my skin. The brush of his hand against mine as he wrote was anything but.

I hate you, I thought, as he moved on to write another letter.

I hate you.

I hate you.

I hate you.

The words were closer to a whisper in my mind than the seething vow they’d once been, but I held to them letter after letter, moment after moment, touch after touch.

When Harry was finished, he capped the pen. My gaze was drawn to his biceps and forearms, no longer under gauze. His second-degree burns had healed nicely. Any scarring he had from them would be light.

His chest was a different matter.

“Twenty letters.” I focused on my hand. “I’m not going to ask what they mean.”

“Excellent.” He rose from the bed, ready to make good on his end of the deal. “Because I wouldn’t tell you.”